Blind Your Ponies Read online

It didn’t work; he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t prevent himself from crossing the hall and peering from the window, down to the asphalt basketball court where the unsettled boy raged against the basket as though he were fighting to stay alive, as though he were afraid he, too, would turn into a Willow Creek ghost. Sam walked away from the window, suddenly agitated, considering the possibility that’s what had happened to him. Had Sam turned into a ghost?

  Later that night, as he lay in his sleepless bed, having read Cervantes until nearly two in the morning, he played tricks with his mind, trying to hold off the haunting that circled his bed like silent moths. Out of the shadows of his memory he could hear his mother’s voice: You get on that elephant!

  That elephant, that little gray elephant thumped its way into his mind on the familiar memory of his mother’s voice. You get on that elephant, I paid good money.

  It had been at a fly-by-night carnival in some ragtag town in Indiana, and Sam was six or seven. When they first saw the exotic creature, circling in a small roped-off area with gleeful children on its back and parents snapping photos, Sam wanted to ride. His mother bought a ticket. Sam waited in line and eventually climbed a step or two of the platform they used for children to mount the animal. The kids just ahead of him were getting on, and Sam found himself at eye level with the unfamiliar beast. He noticed its long eyelashes and thought it must be a girl elephant. All at once the creature gazed at him, opening its eyelid slowly, suddenly presenting him with a porthole into the heart of creation itself. Startled, Sam looked into the elephant’s dark watery eye.

  As young as he was, he immediately recognized a sadness that matched something within him, a grief so excruciating it overwhelmed him. This wasn’t a happy time with laughing children and waving parents. The elephant was heartsick! They were stealing its life! It would never be free to run across the grass, play with other elephants, wade into a lake and splash and frolic. It had been taken hostage, confined to this dreary little circle, day after day, year after year, going in endless circles so that its owner could make money. Sam suddenly sensed the great freighted sorrow of all those creatures of the earth whose lives were pillaged for human gain and satisfaction. He had seen the awful woe in the elephant’s eye, and he had to turn away.

  “I don’t want to ride!” he called to his mother with an escalating panic. “I don’t want to ride!”

  “You get up there and ride, I paid good money for that ticket.”

  The attendant waited impatiently to help him on.

  “I’ll pay you back with my allowance,” Sam said, near tears now.

  “You’ll be all right,” his mother said. “The elephant won’t hurt you.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The nice elephant likes boys and girls.”

  “But, Mom …”

  She thought he was afraid; he wasn’t afraid. He just didn’t want to be a part of the elephant’s murder.

  “You get on right now, you’re holding everyone up, you’ll be all right.”

  Sam climbed on. They loaded two kids behind him. As he waited, he leaned forward and whispered in the elephant’s huge ear: “I’m sorry, elephant, I’m sorry.”

  When he clambered off the animal he couldn’t look back into that window of sorrow, as though he had participated in stealing the animal’s life. From that day, he became a vigilant survivor who, at all costs, avoided looking into the elephant’s eye.

  Sam Pickett, English teacher and former basketball coach at Willow Creek High School, scrounged for sleep in his tangled bed. He was thirty-six years old and he hadn’t a clue as to who he was or what his life was about. He bore a wound he couldn’t heal.

  He pulled the bedding over his head and thought back to the boy playing basketball. Sam was relieved to have severed his connection with the basketball team, yet he couldn’t help harboring the inescapable shame of a traitor.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mervin Painter stood in the drive waiting for his wife, Claire, to get ready, something he’d grown accustomed to over the thirty-one years they’d been married. He ran his eyes over the ranch, and memories glided to him like a red-tailed hawk on the warm August breeze. The original sod hut his grandfather built when he homesteaded the land, now returning to the soil; the two-story frame house in which Mervin grew up, sitting empty; and behind him the ranch-style brick-and-cedar-sided rambler they moved into when his girls were in school.

  He reflected on how well he’d covered his inner firestorm, knowing his neighbors and Willow Creek townsfolk saw him as an easygoing, patient man who faced life with a calm resolve, while inside, underneath that mellow image, he wrestled with unresolved regret and remorse and rage. He would never let on, never give his big brother satisfaction or bewilder his unsuspecting wife.

  Of the two brothers, he had been the loyal son who stayed and worked the land side by side with their father. He had a sweetheart, Maggie Swanson, and everyone in the community figured they’d be married one day. They had plans. Mervin was waiting until he could build them a modest house on the ranch; he’d witnessed the disasters that happened when a couple moved in with their parents.

  It was tough enough living only a few hundred feet apart.

  Having Maggie, a girlfriend, was the one feat Mervin had managed better than his older brother, Carl. Carl never went with a girl more than a few weeks, couldn’t seem to match up. He drank too much, picked up several DUIs, and couldn’t seem to “find himself.”

  Rumors of brutal fights and general carousing filtered through the valley and their father was chagrined. Then, when he turned twenty-one, Carl took off, traipsing around the world, Australia, Mexico, Alaska, writing from distant ports and pleading for money, which their father always sent with the hope that Carl would eventually come home and settle on the land. Mervin prayed that he wouldn’t.

  Carl had not been a good big brother, no buddy or companion you could count on. Three years older, always bigger, often mean and brutal, he would beat up Mervin when Mervin didn’t toe Carl’s line. A punch in the stomach, a bloody nose, and on several occasions Carl had knocked Mervin unconscious. Mervin never tattled. He learned to stay clear of his combative brother, waiting for the time when he would grow big enough to stand up to Carl and, if not beat him, at least do enough damage that Carl would limp away with his own blood leaking onto the ground. About the time Mervin put on the weight and muscle to take Carl on, Carl took off on his world travels, “sowing his wild oats” as people around Willow Creek would say. Rumors circulated that his abrupt departure had to do with some serious trouble he was in, that he’d bitten off more than he could chew.

  More than a year later, Carl returned to the valley but he didn’t come home, stayed with friends and only came by briefly to say hello and retrieve some of his belongings, as if he feared being trapped on the land. He seemed to have money. They’d see him at the Blue Willow and pass him coming or going in his new Chevy pickup.

  One day Dennis Reed told Mervin he saw Carl with Maggie in his pickup. Mervin staggered from the punch to his heart. Maggie with Carl! His girl, his darling, his life. Like a madman he took off looking for his big brother, prepared to tear him apart with his bare hands. He searched everywhere he could imagine, driving back roads frantically until one in the morning, but came up empty.

  Racing to Maggie’s family place west of town, he woke her parents and they discovered she wasn’t in her bed. Mervin waited in his pickup until five-fifteen when Maggie came driving home.

  Sitting in her car, she wouldn’t tell him where Carl was but she got him to calm down and told him over and over how sorry she was. He had hope; he thought she wanted to make up. Then she said she still loved him, but she was going to marry Carl. The blows kept landing, his brother was beating him up again. He pleaded with her, it wasn’t too late, they could put this behind them and go ahead with their plans. No, they couldn’t, she was pregnant.

  He couldn’t find his breath. They had wrestled mightily with waiting until they
were married to make love, though they’d done some pretty heavy necking and petting down by the Jefferson River bridge. She said she wanted to be a virgin on her wedding night and, though he liked the idea of it, he had often tried to persuade her otherwise without success. His big brother is home a month or two and she’s lain with him in his pickup or some hayloft, slipped off her panties, opened her sweetness to him! He tried to block it from his mind and feared he’d go insane.

  He never said another word to her. He drove away without looking back, his brother’s fist tearing something loose in his chest. He couldn’t breathe, thought he’d suffocate. The sun came up as he turned in the ranch road. When his parents asked where he’d been he didn’t respond. He took a shower and went out and worked like a madman without food or drink until long past dark.

  Carl and Maggie were married ten days later, and they moved onto a place with her grandparents over near Churchill. Carl knuckled down working the ranch, they had three boys, and in a few years both of Maggie’s grandparents passed away, leaving their place to the young couple.

  Mervin met Claire the following summer at a friend’s wedding in Livingston and they married a year later. He never felt the same with Claire as he had with Maggie. He tortured himself for years for not marrying Maggie while Carl was away, punished himself unrelentingly for not swallowing his pride and telling Maggie that it didn’t matter that she was pregnant, that he’d marry her and raise the child as their own. He’d always wondered what she would have said. Had she felt trapped and believed she had no option but to marry Carl? Had she been seduced in her simple innocence by his worldly brother though she truly loved Mervin after all? He’d never know.

  As he stood there in the driveway, he couldn’t sort out his feelings.

  He knew he still loved Maggie like he’d love no one else. And he knew he would never do anything to hurt Claire, sweet, childlike Claire. Through all the cousins’ graduations and weddings he’d managed to avoid any private conversation with Maggie, but he knew his brother still drank and at times he thought he caught a sadness in her eyes and the shadow of a bruise on her lovely face.

  When Mervin’s father retired, he willed the family place to Mervin, with Carl’s share to be paid in cash when their father passed on. But what graveled Mervin to the core was that their father gave the old John Deere “D” tractor to Carl, a family heirloom passed down for three generations. Mervin believed he deserved the tractor, the son who stayed home and began working the place with his father the day he graduated from high school, the son who did everything his father ever asked. It was a birthright Carl had forfeited.

  The John Deere “D” was the first tractor their grandfather ever had. He only used it a few years and then purchased a more powerful and versatile machine. Never able to bring himself to trade it in on other equipment, it had become like a faithful old work horse that had carved a soft spot in their grandfather’s heart. The “D” was kept in a machine shed away from weather and sun ever since and was “a rare son-bitch” as Mervin’s father used to say. Carl only displayed it in parades, antique shows and the like, a treasured family coat of arms. It should have gone to Mervin.

  Mervin had come to the point where he couldn’t stay in church that Sunday each year when the text for the day was “The Prodigal Son.” Damn it, his father had killed the fatted calf when his wayward brother came home, only it was the John Deere “D” he gave him, as though it were a symbol that he’d forgiven him and taken him back with open arms. Mervin would pretend to be ill or find some other excuse to leave when he’d glance at the bulletin and see that Luke 15:11-32 would be the basis for the minister’s sermon. He’d be damned if he’d put himself through that anymore.

  Son, you are always with me

  And all that is mine is yours.

  It was fitting to make merry and be glad,

  For this your brother was dead, and is alive;

  He was lost, and is found.

  Why didn’t the sonofabitch stay lost.

  Mervin turned and glanced at the fine ranch home he’d built, realizing Claire should be coming out any minute. Over the years he had tried to let the wounds heal, let go of the pain and disappointment, all of it, and he had succeeded to some degree, but as if fate had a hand in it, Carl’s boys had gone to Manhattan Christian, a private school in the little village of Churchill with a solid basketball program and an endless supply of good players, while Mervin’s girls went to Willow Creek, a school that had difficulty finding six or seven boys for the team and who hadn’t won a game in recent memory. And every year, in their cool and restrained relationship, he and Carl bet five dollars on the game. It wasn’t the five dollars, but he was sick and tired of being beaten by his big brother and the two annual games between their teams only rubbed salt in old wounds and reminded him that he lost again, lost Maggie, lost the life he planned, lost the goddamn John Deere “D.”

  Claire came out of the house dressed in her Sunday best and waved as she got into the gray Ford Fairlane. Mervin checked his watch and hurried to the car. They were picking up the exchange student at the airport outside Bozeman. They had conceived and raised four daughters, and after a quartet, they had given up both the hope and any further attempt to hatch a male Painter in their antimasculine fluids. They accepted the town’s basketball heritage with a resolute grit and no little amount of guilt at not producing any boys to lift Willow Creek’s banner out of the manure. Their daughters excelled off the land, and two of them had become exchange students, one spending a year in Spain, one a year in Brazil.

  Being the fair-minded soul Claire was, she felt obliged to volunteer as a host family for some youngster who wanted to visit the U.S. for a year of study and cultural shock in Willow Creek. Thus a boy from Norway, Olaf Gustafson, would cross the Atlantic and most of the United States to spend the school year on the land where three generations of Painters had taken a stand to carve out a livelihood by raising cattle in Montana’s auspicious and fickle bosom. Mervin thought it was the least they could do now that their daughters were married and scattered all over the country.

  They had exchanged letters and received a bundle of information about Olaf—age, health, scholastic record, hobbies, everything, including a picture of him standing alone in front of his house in Oslo. Claire said he looked kind of skinny and they’d have to put some meat on his bones. But neither Claire nor Mervin, nor anyone in the school office, paid any attention to information given in metric numbers or tried to translate them into U.S. equivalents.

  His flight touched down on time, and the gleaming Northwest 727 rolled smoothly to the concourse gate. Claire shared her anxiety as she shifted from foot to foot and fidgeted with her hands.

  “What are we getting into?” she said. “What if he is unhappy and loud and impolite? What if he causes trouble and drinks liquor and gets into fights?”

  Passengers began streaming from the concourse: men, women, children, all kinds of ordinary-looking people. Claire clutched the identifying snapshot as she clung to a nervous smile, the lines in her round porcelain face apparently cracks from that perpetual expression, a smile Mervin took for granted, knowing it was Claire’s way of facing the uncertainties of life, knowing she could come with her right arm mangled in the baler, still bearing that sunbeam smile.

  “What if he missed a connection?” she said.

  “There’s still a few coming,” Mervin said.

  Then, ducking through the gate with wide blue eyes and straw-colored hair, Olaf came bearing a duffel bag and a bright, boyish grin.

  “The bed!” Claire said. “What will we do about the bed?”

  They stepped forward as he came through the roped-off passenger area.

  “Olaf?” Claire said with a voice of disbelief.

  “Ya, hello. You are the Painters?”

  “Yes,” Claire said.

  Mervin just stood there like a stump, with fantastic possibilities roaring through his head.

  “Happy I am to be here �
� to meet you,” the boy said.

  He held out his hand to Mervin. Mervin looked up at him without moving a muscle.

  “How tall are you?” Mervin managed to say.

  “Two hundred and eleven centimeters, ah … what you call … six foot and eleven inches.”

  Mervin couldn’t keep from smiling while he vigorously shook Olaf’s hand. Immediately, his brother Carl came to mind.

  CHAPTER 5

  Diana Murphy hung the long, colored chart of dinosaurs on the right edge of the blackboard. After stepping back and studying the effect, she untacked the chart and fastened it on the left. She was in a rush to ready her classroom with last-minute details, and she reprimanded herself for her inability to make a decision. There was no right or wrong, she told herself, either would do at this point. She recognized she had tiptoed through life, overly cautious, always afraid of making the simplest mistake.

  She walked to the window, then looked down at the children in the schoolyard, where they chased and yelled and mingled in the early September sunlight. Amidst this crowd, Diana spotted two small girls, probably first graders, holding hands and approaching the building timidly. She suddenly felt a heaviness in her stomach, an overwhelming sorrow that left her breathless, and she tried to attribute it to first-day jitters.

  She hadn’t been here for the first day of school last year, arriving instead in January to replace a teacher on maternity leave. Diana remembered how she’d found the opening on the Montana Education Association’s newsletter: a general science teacher at the elementary and high school level with experience in health, P.E., and some coaching. She remembered how she finally found Willow Creek on the map—after some serious nose-to-the-table squinting—and how she had a feeling this was the kind of place she had been searching for.

  But then she arrived at Willow Creek and she couldn’t deny the second thoughts that overwhelmed her. The blacktop highway curved into town and led to the first and most impressive building on Main Street: the Blue Willow Inn, a bright, blue two-story wood-frame building with white trim and a boardwalk porch across the front. Though not the geographical center of town, Diana discovered it was undoubtedly the social center, open throughout the day as a gathering place for rumors and gossip as well as for serving meals in its historic dining room and dispensing beer and hard liquor from the tavern side of the establishment.